I want to write a story by playing Pathfinder completely by myself. Any ideas for homebrew mechanics to simulate plot tropes, like plot armor?

[Reksew_Trebla]

Okay I actually have an idea for plot armor: Roll twice for everything, and take the better result for the characters with plot armor.

How about "conservation of ninjutsu" (the trope where the more enemies there are, the worse they will do)? Not sure how to do this, other than maybe, say, a level 10 party fighting enough level 1 Goblins that the total encounter is TECHNICALLY level appropriate. Because each Goblin will go down in a single hit, and likely can only hit the party on a nat 20, but there are so many of them that on average, they will get a lot of nat 20s.

Any better ideas for these, or others tropes?

PS: My inspiration is that one tumblr post of a person saying they want to play d&d by themselves, then responding that they've been informed this is called writing a book.

[Mudfoot]

I've been playing solo like this for a few years on and off; it started when PF first came out and I wanted to try it out, so I played it as though I were GMing it properly. I've done it entirely without plot armour, letting the dice fall exactly as they did and writing the story to explain the results. I've had PCs go negative a few times, but no deaths yet. Closest was the narrator PC getting within 1 round of bleeding out. Point buy was high (25ish).

I thought I'd need to use Hero Points or some similar mechanic to save PCs from death, but I've not needed it yet. I'm up to about 60000 words of deathless prose, though only 3rd/4th level (slow xp track).

Provided you're a bit careful about how you arm your monsters (beware of x3 crit weapons and don't CdG without excellent reasons, for example) you may not need much plot armour at all.

[mardaddy]

You may get some inspiration through this...

Dave the Commoner

[Reksew_Trebla]

Mudfoot wrote:

I've been playing solo like this for a few years on and off; it started when PF first came out and I wanted to try it out, so I played it as though I were GMing it properly. I've done it entirely without plot armour, letting the dice fall exactly as they did and writing the story to explain the results. I've had PCs go negative a few times, but no deaths yet. Closest was the narrator PC getting within 1 round of bleeding out. Point buy was high (25ish).

I thought I'd need to use Hero Points or some similar mechanic to save PCs from death, but I've not needed it yet. I'm up to about 60000 words of deathless prose, though only 3rd/4th level (slow xp track).

Provided you're a bit careful about how you arm your monsters (beware of x3 crit weapons and don't CdG without excellent reasons, for example) you may not need much plot armour at all.

Thank you for the response. I’ll keep this in mind when I get around to doing this.

mardaddy wrote:

You may get some inspiration through this...

Dave the Commoner

This is very helpful. Thank you.